From Woke to Solidarity

Michael S. Roth reviews Musa al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke” and James Davison Hunter’s “Democracy and Solidarity.”

By Michael S. RothDecember 24, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• Politics

CRITICIZING THE “WOKE” is by now the carnival game in which every player gets a prize. We have the conservative politicians who appear quite certain that rampaging radicals are corrupting children by indoctrinating them into the cults of gender ideology and critical race theory. And then there are the Marxists who are appalled that so-called “progressives” use racial or gender identity as categories more important than class. Classical liberals get in on the action too, worrying that the policing of privilege and the managing of microaggressions will come at the expense of free speech or due process. Like “politically correct” before it, “woke” started out as a word activists applied to themselves and then became a pejorative hurled back at them from all sides. The only game at the carnival that gives out more prizes than Whack-a-Woke is Eliminate-an-Elite.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi doesn’t want his readers to think he’s just another player taking shots at woke fish in a barrel. He conceives his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite as belonging to “a tradition of Black critique […] highlighting how liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good.” Of course, he isn’t surprised to discover that these people don’t fight against inequality in ways that might compromise their own status. But al-Gharbi doesn’t want to be seen as yet another pundit pointing out the hypocrisy of liberal elites. He uses an impressive range of sociological data to show why these elites, in which he often includes himself, develop political views that are a reaction to their reduced opportunities for economic advancement or improved social status. To make sure we take his relatively simple argument seriously, he includes 45 pages packed with endnotes and 55 pages of bibliography (in which there are 29 separate self-citations).

Al-Gharbi’s argument leans on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s description of how the inequalities generated by capitalism are legitimated through symbolic capital. People express their sense of status by performing their taste—be it the museums they go to, the music they listen to, or the foods they eat. One’s preferences thus indicate to others where one stands in a socioeconomic hierarchy. Al-Gharbi is very good at showing that not a few folks who are relatively well-off—i.e., elites—would like to have preferences that align with those who are struggling against the hierarchy from which those same elites benefit. These folks have various communication channels at their disposal, using them to signal that they are allies of those who want change, even radical change. Al-Gharbi repeatedly shows that these people are taking positions very much at odds with how they in fact live. To make things worse, “in an apparent bid to avoid confronting or exposing the gap between their own rhetoric and behaviors, people can become especially militant in policing others who publicly diverge from the institutionally dominant view.” When you live in a glass house, it’s prudent to have handy many stones to throw.

Al-Gharbi categorizes these folks as “symbolic capitalists.” Told in school that they were smart, they decided to pursue professions at best adjacent to the core productive areas of the economy. They were thinking lofty thoughts, or learning complex methodologies, and these skills would lead to jobs. Yet the value of their jobs was not to be measured in paychecks. Those in the symbolic professions, “doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, tech workers,” the author tells us, were “explicitly legitimized on the basis of their altruism.” These professionals weren’t supposed to be in it for the money, though some of them for years fared well economically. Sometimes, though, there were just too many of them for the jobs available. They weren’t supposed to care about making big bucks, but when the mainstream economy no longer rewarded them, they swung to more extreme (in their minds) “progressive” views. Perhaps the symbolic rewards of being “radical,” or at least “being on the ‘right side of history,’” would make up for the fact that they were better off than most but not as well off as they thought they should be.

Al-Gharbi puts the changing fortunes of the symbolic capitalists into a useful historical framework, pointing out four “Great Awokenings” in American history. The first began during the Great Depression when writers, artists, and other educated workers were radicalized by the absence of economic opportunity. The second came when white students were drafted to fight in Vietnam—regardless of their expressive abilities. The third moment of radicalization was, again, a response to an economic downturn, especially at universities, at the end of the 1980s through the early 1990s. And most recently, a radicalization stemming from the “overproduction of elites” followed the Great Recession of 2008. People were still earning degrees, indeed in greater numbers than ever, but there were few secure jobs open to them. Radical indictments of “the system” and of “privilege” followed. “Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them,” al-Gharbi writes, “by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.”

The problem, as al-Gharbi powerfully shows, is that the issues that symbolic capitalists care about are not ones that will make a meaningful difference in the lives of those who are genuinely poor. Renaming a school or changing policies about who uses which bathroom will mean nothing to people who are chronically unemployed or uninsured. To make matters worse, symbolic capitalists tend to hoard opportunities as soon as they get the chance, creating back channels to benefit those closest to them. Rhetorical radicalism sits comfortably with underpaying domestic help or maintaining economically segregated schools. “By almost any measure,” al-Gharbi insists, “symbolic capitalists are the primary ‘winners’ in the prevailing order.” There may not be enough spots in the top five percent for all those with reputable diplomas, but almost all those credential holders are better off than the majority of workers.

Those who work—or aspire to work—in the symbolic professions often espouse beliefs that show their nonallegiance to traditional values. But the way they live is much closer to reflecting those values than the way they talk. For example, al-Gharbi, drawing on the work of Rob K. Henderson and others, shows that while symbolic capitalists applaud nontraditional family structures, they are the most likely to instill in their children the “discipline” it takes to create two-parent families. The author cuttingly adds: “It is easy to describe traditional families as unnecessary and outmoded when one has already reaped the benefits of growing up in a traditional family structure and is well on the way to producing a traditional family oneself.”

“We are some of the main beneficiaries of the inequalities we condemn,” says al-Gharbi, who characterizes himself as a symbolic capitalist—one who, as he notes, in affiliating with a radical Black tradition, leveraged the perceived “victim” status associated with being Black. Al-Gharbi conveys his self-awareness and his lack of discomfort with mocking elites that talk about themselves as victims while continuing to exploit others. It feels so good to point out the moral failings in others—whether directly or, as the author does, at a meta level.

Al-Gharbi reminds the reader repeatedly that he shares some of the failings he documents in others. And then there’s the tone of his book. He writes with the frustration of the underrecognized, with the anger of someone who finds that the symbolic professions have (so far) failed him. Here again, the criticism of other symbolic capitalists also applies to him: they are “jockeying to secure the position they feel they ‘deserve.’” Finally, after documenting hypocrisy for 300 pages, he recognizes that one might ask what one should do about it. His reply—that “it is beyond [his] capacity to provide definitive answers”—he must know is unsatisfying.

By way of conclusion, al-Gharbi offers moral admonition: if equality is so important to you, stop trying to accumulate wealth. On his final page, he cites Jesus and a Marxist philosopher because both say that you should judge a person not by what they say they believe but by what they do. Al-Gharbi has himself done something interesting, I believe, in writing this book. It’s a real service for the commentariat, and I am sure that it will change his relative position among symbolic and other capitalists. I am less sure what he expects it to inspire his readers to do about inequality.

In Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis (2024), James Davison Hunter offers another diagnosis of what is wrong with contemporary American culture. Where al-Gharbi is focused on the foibles of educated elites, Hunter looks at the evolution of our country’s deep political culture. Al-Gharbi seems concerned at the close of his book about inequality, though it is unclear that having more symbolic capitalists sharing that concern would make us more equal. Perhaps by turning their attention to more significant problems than symbolic wounds, it would. Hunter, by contrast, thinks that liberal democracy itself may be coming to an end in the United States because its shared political culture has been seriously eroded. He explores that culture by examining the writings of some of the leading intellectuals in the country, from the founding period to the present day. He looks to them, and to those whom al-Gharbi would call symbolic capitalists, to rebuild that culture.

Democratic practices, Hunter argues, can only be sustained when they take place within a framework of solidarity. They can only generate legitimate relations of power and authority if members of the polity agree on some things in common. Without such commonalities, he fears that solidarity will be imposed by authoritarians who promise to restore wealth, power, and greatness.

Democracy and Solidarity is a rich book filled with nuanced interpretations of some of the key texts in American political thought. It charts how the “syncretism” of the Enlightenment in the United States sustained the colonial and founding period, and how it broke down by the end of the 1800s. Hunter means that American writers managed to sustain both a Christian and an Enlightenment moral framework. The resultant tensions were productive, and the overall framework prevented more radical disagreements. Despite some examples of powerful anti-theistic writers during the early years of the republic, there was, he claims, a shared understanding that the US thrives because it is under divine guidance. We still can hear politicians echo this claim today, but Hunter shows how its deep authority has been undermined since the Civil War, when both sides in the conflict claimed godly approval.

The “cultural logics” that enabled white Southerners to enslave Black people were still in place after the institution was destroyed. These were deep structures that enabled Northerners to profit from slavery without too much moral questioning. In both cases, white Americans assumed that God was on their side; when South and North justified their bloody sacrifices while holding Bibles in their hands, the result was a delegitimization of biblical authority with respect to policy and public life. The Christian framework for democracy in the United States had provided a sense of shared purpose, or at least of undertaking a shared journey. But after the Civil War, says Hunter, Christianity was no longer “a credible source of knowledge, ethics, and collective moral purpose for the nation.” Without that shared source, there was no basis for solidarity. What would replace it?

One answer comes from the pragmatist John Dewey, who sought to turn “ordinary people from a concern for salvation to one of self-realization.” Hunter, though, finds that Dewey’s attempt to construct a “natural piety” falls short. Philosophers like Dewey and the scientists they supported offered only a “cult of technique.” The secular humanism that developed by the middle of the 20th century seems merely weak tea to Hunter. Efforts by mid-20th-century liberals to replace a religious framework with a commitment to ideas such as freedom, democracy, and unrestricted inquiry never motivated enough Americans to a common “fighting faith,” to use Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s phrase.

Although humanism in the US aspired to be universal, it had, like any faith, a habit of drawing borders to separate the included from the excluded. In some ways, one had the worst of both worlds: limited solidarity and damaging modes of exclusion. Communists, for example, could reliably be written out of the American family just as racialized groups or immigrants had been. Hunter calls this “boundary work,” and he knows that this has been “bloody business” throughout our history.

Of course, the desire for belonging hardly disappears from American history, and at times its intensity sparks bright flashes of solidarity. Transcendental frameworks—be it Reinhold Niebuhr on forgiveness or Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolence—have inspired millions. “When you rise to love on this level,” says King, “you begin to love men not because they are likable, but because God loves them.” But this higher level was never something to which all Americans climbed (or even aspired to climb). Religion in the United States became a way of belonging to specific communities—very powerful for various groups, but not expected to be accepted by all.

Without a common framework for adjudicating the differences that arise in a democratic polity, culture war replaces discussion or debate. Hunter has written extensively on this topic before, noting that many Americans appeal to a transcendental, God-given order while others appeal to notions of justice rooted in historical progress. In Democracy and Solidarity, he underscores the fact that ascendant neoliberalism had hoped to show people that economic prosperity was what was always meant by freedom. Free markets should be enough, or at least they were the necessary condition for political freedom. But “neoliberalism simply could not offer a vision of the common good,” Hunter argues, and the free market narrative wound up being “profoundly corrosive to […] solidarity.”

The beginning of the 2008 Great Recession launched a “fundamentally new and different moment in the evolving culture wars.” Progressives still claimed to be on the right side of history, but now they attached their ideals of progress to the fortunes of oppressed identity groups. “The advantage of this ideological shift,” Hunter writes, “was that it created the artifice of concern for the marginalized while retaining the newly found economic, educational, and political advantages of elites.” This “artifice of concern” is in alignment with al-Gharbi’s critique of hypocritical symbolic capitalists. We Have Never Been Woke analyzes the bad faith of those of us who have, in Hunter’s words, “the smug sense of being on the winning side of history.”

Lamenting the breakdown of solidarity is not just wondering why (to use words made famous by Rodney King after he was beaten by police) we can’t “all just get along.” It’s showing that, at a deep cultural level, each side has lost “the capacity to cast a vision that could be inclusive of the other’s deepest commitments.” Hunter sees this breakdown, this “exhaustion” of our capacity to connect, as a form of nihilism. One response to this nihilism comes from the liberal pragmatist Richard Rorty, a response Hunter finds inadequate to the challenges of persuasion without foundations. Another response is that of the proudly reactionary writers of the Claremont Institute, which Hunter finds appalling. Their ideas on how one might impose beliefs in a common moral framework entail a willingness to abandon procedural ideals (and the Constitution)—a sign, he thinks, of their own certainties about what is right (and what is perverse). Trumpism has only accelerated the erosion of any appeals to some common vision of an ethical future. Trump in 2016 and again in 2024 gives each side in political disputes reasons for justifying the exclusion of the other.

In what Hunter calls our “Late-Stage Democracy,” relativism has won the day: “Now nearly everyone is a skeptic, nearly everyone sees the hypocrisy, nearly everyone doubts the goodwill of their leaders.” Arguments from one’s fellow citizens are “interpreted as a threat to the right of the aggrieved to exist.” Rage has become a form of cultural capital, and grievance gives one moral authority when so many see political debates in existential terms. In this situation, says Hunter, authoritarianism can flourish. Recently, we’ve relearned that, yes, it can.

Hunter’s book shows how challenging it is for an Enlightenment project such as liberal democracy to survive in a post-Enlightenment age, while Al-Gharbi’s underscores the failures of those who try to scold our way out of the current crisis. Al-Gharbi makes clear that there is no possibility of substituting symbolic victories over pronouns and microaggressions for the work of addressing economic inequality and political disenfranchisement. It is less clear that he himself is doing something other than scolding the symbolic capitalists about whom he despairs but with whom he identifies. Hunter sees the inequalities that concern al-Gharbi but insists that the country’s economic problems are also connected to a crisis of recognition and respect, a plague of nihilism. The cultural crisis in the United States, Hunter shows, stems from the absence of a shared framework that would allow citizens to find paths to compromise that would not leave substantial numbers of citizens feeling they no longer belong.

As Hunter knows, this was the problem that pragmatists like Dewey and Rorty addressed in their political and cultural writings. The pragmatists refused to make the transcendental or foundational move that believers (and sometimes ex-believers) long for. I find Hunter unpersuasive when he argues that this refusal meant that the pragmatists were doomed to rely on mechanistic approaches to change, or that they only appealed to the scientific method. Pragmatists have long held that, just as people in the past were brought together to serve God, they can also be brought together by shared projects, shared aspirations. Of course, people can also fight about those projects or fail to come to consensus. But that was certainly also the case with religious disputes in a country without the authority of a single faith.

Al-Gharbi calls his book an exercise in negative epistemology. That’s a fancy way of saying he’s showing some symbolic capitalists that their actions are not aligned with their rhetoric and other symbolic capitalists that they were always right to be suspicious of the woke. Al-Gharbi (and now almost everyone else) is critical of identity politics, but Hunter goes beyond this critique to seek renewal through an anti-utopian, practical vision for our political culture. We “will not find renewal without the moral imagination to envision a public life that transcends the present warring binaries,” he writes “and with it, a fresh vocabulary with which to talk about and pragmatically address the genuine problems the nation and the world face.” This seems to me exactly right, and very much in the spirit of a pragmatism that can inspire and not just instruct. This is, after all, what Rorty, following Dewey, called for. In the mode of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (who go unmentioned in Hunter’s book), Rorty wrote that we need a “new, self-creating community, united not by knowledge of the same truths but by sharing the same generous, inclusivist, democratic hopes.”

Like the pragmatists, Hunter recognizes that we need antiauthoritarian inspiration to help generate new modes of solidarity. Our fellow citizens are not the enemy in a culture war, he writes; nihilism is. As Donald Trump claims his electoral mandate and promises to punish his enemies, inclusive democratic inspiration may be difficult to come by. “Vision and courage are essential,” Hunter tells us, “but they are the qualities most missing from our leadership class.” We need visionary and brave culture makers who can help us create narratives not of grievance but of community, not of division but of solidarity. In our post-Enlightenment world, they are our best hope, woke or not.

¤

Featured image: E. B. and E. C. Kellogg. The Eagle’s Nest, 1861. Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Lithography Collection, National Museum of American History (60.2550). CC0, americanhistory.si.edu. Accessed December 17, 2024. Image has been cropped.